“... are a snooty woman in a children’s book. Your Malteses, your Chihuahuas. The utility breeds have no adjectives in common. During the judging, a commentator described the group as ‘hugely varied … we’ve got some very large breeds, some breeds which were bred for running and some which were bred to be eaten, unfortunately.’ There were 174 bulldogs this ...”

“... Si monumentum requiris, circumspice. Even those, John Campbell suggests, who have little or no memory of Margaret Thatcher, live in a world she created; and from which there is no going back. More than any other British prime minister, even Gladstone, she conforms to Max Weber’s type of the modern demagogic politician: the leader who appeals directly to the electorate over the heads of the party machine; and who subordinates the machine to his or her political personality ...”

“... and Morgan the dark-glassed have lost part of their integrity to an extraneous attribute. They are no longer free to be just themselves. Not being free to be just themselves is what the women in Attercliffe’s life chiefly complain about. Sometimes it is men in general that they blame: ‘Women are encouraged to strike out for themselves, and all they strike ...”

“... gangsters’. Martin Scorsese’s Little Italy childhood was spent a short distance from the no-longer Points, and though the stories in Asbury’s book started a thirty-year obsession to transform The Gangs of New York into Gangs of New York, what made it to the screen reflects less the book’s lore than its pervasive atmosphere of ...”

“... what took place at Beijing airport on Monday, 21 February 1972. It’s also the opening scene of John Adams’s opera Nixon in China, premiered in Houston in 1987, and staged again at the London Coliseum over a few evenings last summer. An actual occurrence then, but also, as Adams and his librettist Alice Coleman understood, a brightly lit performance with ...”

“... I have no journalistic ability,’ Malachi Whitaker wrote in her memoir, And So Did I (1939), ‘and could not tell a good story to save my life.’ By this point she had published four collections of short stories with Jonathan Cape. In a review of her first book, Frost in April (1929), Vita Sackville-West called her a ‘born writer’ and praised her stories as ‘economical, unsentimental and absolutely convincing ...”

“... it adversity, that such beauty does exist.’ Baraka made the observation in his liner notes to John Coltrane’s album Live at Birdland, which includes ‘Alabama’, an elegy for the four girls murdered in the 1963 Birmingham Church bombing.I thought of Baraka’s words at New York’s Riverside Church last Saturday, at the funeral of the alto saxophonist ...”

“... undignified and unnatural circus tricks. At the end of this formidable survey of the aristocracy John Beckett notes that they have survived into the late 20th century ‘as protectors of the nation’s heritage’ and that some ‘even argue that as collectors of beautiful objects over time their families were thinking not merely of self-interest but of the ...”

“... and even humility coexisted alongside a habit of self-justification and a mania for work. ‘No time today!’ Sir Gilbert would cry as he swept out of his office to the next appointment, brushing assistants aside. There cannot have been much intimacy for the boy. Though he grew up in awe of his father, he came to nurture disagreements and perhaps ...”

“... parents’ chaise-longue. The next morning I went out and bought ‘Hound Dog’; Bruce, who had no extra spending money, dragged his mother to a music store to rent a guitar. To Bruce, raised among the bottom-feeders of ‘redneck ugly’ Freehold, New Jersey, Elvis sounded a new message: ‘we the great unwashed, the powerless, the marginalised, THE ...”

“... the Russian state, which in its organisation has changed very little since Soviet times. There are no strong independent civic institutions, and the Army, Interior Ministry and intelligence services are still obedient to the President, while he has succeeded in implementing a new constitution that increases his personal powers and enables him, more and more ...”

“... had gone from him. He became at some uncertain point the patient – the Roussel money talking, no doubt – of the top man in Paris for mind disorders, Pierre Janet, and crops up under a pseudonym as a case-study in Janet’s book, From Anguish to Ecstasy. ‘A shy, scrupulous, neuropathic young man, easily depressed’, Janet sums up his patient, whom he ...”

“... about whom we know effectively nothing – not even whether such a person existed, for there is no contemporary evidence for him at all, and the closest approaches to it (Gildas’s sixth-century account of the ‘ruin of Britain’ and the Welsh poem Gododdin) either do not name him or may contain later legendary interpolations. On the other hand, we have ...”

“... movements and events: the Catharists, the Brethren of the Free Spirit, the Lollards, the Ranters, John of Leyden and the French Commune. Marcus draws these and others into his secret history of the 20th century because he is interested in revolution and apocalypse: the kind of secret history which moves not in a world elsewhere, beyond the periphery of our ...”

“... glad to be in his favour.’ This will all seem familiar to aficionados of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall: in the following reign, Thomas Cromwell was the apotheosis (or nadir) of these ‘new men’. As Steven Gunn argues in his new book, a work of characteristic meticulousness, not only did these men encapsulate the mood, workings and functioning of Henry ...”